Posted
by
timothy
on Friday February 18, 2011 @05:04AM
from the triumph-of-the-will dept.

thecarchik writes with news of an analysis published in Energy Policy by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis. "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources, said author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor, saying it is only a question of 'whether we have the societal and political will.' During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline. Beyond that, we can't project."

There was an article in The Economist a few months back about several companies that are working on what's essentially synthetic gasoline and that they are planning on producing in significant volumes within the next three years or so. I'm eager for practical alternatives to oil so that we can stop kissing OPEC's ass.

Gasoline is not the only thing derived from petroleum resources.. You will still depend heavily on OPEC for all of your plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, and thousands of other uses. So OPEC will still continue to be pretty difficult to ignore.

If fuel can be made from petroleum substitutes, this frees up petroleum for petro-chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, etc. I'd be slightly surprised, but only slightly, if US domestic production of oil couldn't satisfy all non-fuel needs in the US. And if can't, then there are all oil exporting non-OPEC nations like Canada, Great Britain, Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil, etc.

81% of petroleum goes into fuel production, in the US. If we remove that percentage from common use, we go from approximately 90,000 bbl a day to under 20,000. That's about the production of just the US and Russia combined. Alternatively, the US, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Brazil and the UK would do the same job. That still leaves many other countries whose smaller production can add up to something not all that negligible, and it assumes current levels of production for all countries listed. On top of that, t

To be more precise, gasoline + a bit of diesel [wikipedia.org] is half of all oil consumption. As you can see from this graph [piggington.com], if we combine US production and Canadian production, we'll be pretty close to kicking OPEC to the curb. Although most likely we'll just reduce consumption from all sources.

Somewhat longer term, though, there's the question of whether we can continue to afford internal combustion engines with a thermal efficiency around 20%. The same feedstocks and some of the processes for producing synthetic gasoline could also be used to produce methane; methane can power a combined-cycle electric generator at about 60% thermal efficiency. Almost all well-to-wheel (or other source-to-wheel) studies suggest that electric cars provide a 2:1 advantage, plus or minus a bit, in overall energy

The main issue is cost of such move. Even if all the humanity decided this is needed and necessary, the raw materials needed to this change would alone like require global mining development investment that would dwarf budget of USA as most of these clean technologies tend to require (really) rare earths and certain chemical compounds that are quite scarce and unlikely to be made much cheaper even by economy of mass production due to natural scarcity in earth crust.

Wow, what a horrible site full of misinformation and straw man arguments.

This site was funded by the Bradley Foundation [wikipedia.org], who also funded hard-right "think tank" groups such as PNAC, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Federalist Society. The authors affirm [pop.org] they are a network of "pro-life" groups.

The site begins by linking belief in overpopulation to efforts to kill the poor and promote Chinese abortions, then proceeds with meaningless factoids (all the humans on earth could

I think it's more about the money.Free energy? What else do you need once you have that.Free energy solves nearly everything. Of course, we might not actually get real renewable energy (100.00%) but if we do...Then you don't need to pay for light, heating directly. All other supplies can be operated on free energy as well and cost nearly zero.

There's still a lot of other things requiring humans to work (medicine, entertainment, etc)) but all the basic needs could be fulfilled for everyone.It means, the rich couldn't exploit the poor anymore since the poor could just live on with minimum effort if he wanted to. Which also means things would get more equal. That's not something the rich will want to happen.

Wind power is renewable, the "fuel" is completely free, but collecting the wind and turning it into usable power is not free. Turbines have to be built, maintained, replaced at end of lfe, land to site them needs to be bought or rented etc. Overall, wind is often more expensive (and has to be subsidised as a result), at least per unit of electricity generated, than oil/gas at current prices.

It *is* possible to have green energy without major subsidies - it's called nuclear power. Wind and solar currently require too large a subsidy to be cost competitive, though I'm certainly taking advantage of it and converting my house to solar next week. Thanks

The problem with nuclear power is that there is a lot of uncertainty. Solar thermal is too close for comfort, it's in the same order of magnitude now in cost/Watt and a few advances can easily tip the scale. Solar thermal can also be deployed a hell of a lot faster. No matter how much you liberalise the market and ease the regulations, no one is going to invest in nuclear where you can only start making money back after a couple of decades with that hanging over their heads... not unless government shoulders some of the risk.

Personally if I was the US government though I'd just throw a couple of 100 billion at solar thermal, buy out the patents and fill some deserts with solar thermal plants and build a HVDC network to distribute the electricity... even if it's more expensive than nuclear it will be online faster, and the odds are good that during building the costs will drop.

Nuclear is slow, messy, unnecessary and would set a terrible example to the rest of the world (nuclear power is always a proliferation risk).

What we need to do, same as with Israel and Palestine and many others, is dump shitloads of weapons on them, let them duke it out fairly and then, when they finally have enough of killing each other, we could sit down and help them build something worthwhile.

You cannot bring peace and you cannot go and end wars. Only the people involved can do that. They need to want to, they need the guts to stand up and try and they need the staying power to see it through. It's social evolution, and we can't do it for th

I'm trying to think of an example where a foreign invasion has resulted in installing a government that protects and encourages the freedom of the people involved. The only one that comes to mind is West Germany, and that took a lot of time and investment, and probably wouldn't have happened without the Russian threat. In contrast, I can think of dozens of examples where the new government has - at best - been differently bad, and often worse.

One of the fundamental problems I don't understand how to overcome is modern mass-produce agriculture relies on massive quantities of oil-based fertilizer, tractors constantly going up and down fields planting, spraying and harvesting, then the food being shipped all over the world. Cheap oil is crucial to the availability of cheap mass-produced food. If the price per barrel goes up to the region of $250 and more. Then food is surely going to experience massive price rises too.

Huh? HVDC does do 1000s of kilometres, these lines are in operation. Now geopolitically this isn't an option for a lot of the world (the EU for instance would need solar thermal power plants in Africa... and Africa is a shithole). The US however has plenty of deserts with plenty of sundays per year to be able to supply itself at very high uptimes even with limited storage (say one or two days).

If it had the will the US could be energy independent in a couple of decades... but the powers that be don't want that, no country is allowed any sort of independence any more. It would set a bad example and might prevent the rise of our neofeudalist overlords.

"The most economic solution for long-distance bulk power transmission, due to lower losses, is transmission with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC). A basic rule of thumb: for every 1,000 kilometres the DC line losses are less than 3% (e.g. for 5,000 MW at a voltage of 800 kV)."

With that you could get energy from the equator to Santa Claus without losing half the power (26% loss over 10000 Kilometre). Within the United States the losses would be negligible.

When we install anywhere near the capacity needed to get 10% of worldwide energy from renewables, we will have no choice : we will have to make a region the size of a small continent entirely lifeless. For 100% we will absolutely need to "steal" so much energy half the atlantic ocean would no longer contain so much as a s single fish.

You clearly have no idea as to what you're talking about nor did you do any math before you made your knee jerk reaction. We would only need a small fraction of the Sun's energy. It would hardly even be a blip on the global scale.

Nor do you propose any alternatives. I'm thinking perhaps you're trolling. At least I hope you are trolling, because the alternative is you're just not very smart.

The Sahara is not a desert because of humans. It's a desert because of the motion of the Earth. The Earth wobbles like a top, it's why your astrological sign doesn't correspond to where the sun rises on the day you were born anymore. They were accurate about 2000 years ago, Leos being born with the sun in the constallation of Leo, and so on, but the precession of the Earth screwed that up. Similarly, the Sahara goes through forest->desert->forest every few thousand years. It's how Neanderthals were able to leave Africa and settle in Europe, but no members of our species were found in Europe until relatively recently. The Sahara dried up after some Neanderthals went through, and after it became a desert, our species was unable to traverse it. Until we got more advanced technology.

Most of the war and the fights in the world that has lead to people suffering, also by hunger. Has been communism against democracy. And I don't know who to blame the most. To me it seems that the "Democratic" countries has done more damage than good. Look at vietnam, somalia etc etc.

You don't know who to blame the most?

Here's a clue: the Khmer Rouge murdered a million or two of their own people. And their numbers were vastly exceeded by the Soviets and the Red Chinese.

Nothing the US or other democracies did can ever compare with the scope of genocides, atrocities, and mass starvations caused by communism in the 20th century.

Farming subsidies exist so western countries don't have to rely on third world dictators and their enslaved workers for their daily bread. Africa is an entire continent, they should be able to bootstrap their economies by selling to one another. It would need a good unified plan however.

... so fuck 'em. My generation had a pain in the ass dealing with all the bullshit that mere existence dished out, so let's just let's just leave nuclear waste, lack of petroleum based fuels, etc, as a problem for forthcoming generations.

We'll just have China make all the composites and fabricate all the solar panels, mine and refine all the nickle and do all the other nasty work to make our 'clean' new 'renewable' energy system work. Install it here in the West and not talk about the contaminants and pollution we've exported to Asian kids.

Breeder reactors are clean and never run out of fuel. Hydro is very dirty from enviromental view and very destructive. Solar is getting better. Wind and wave are also dead ends for total replacement as they dont scale. Geothermal and hydrogen could be viable, too.

Please do explain how "Hydro is very dirty from environmental view and very destructive". Then, if you are able to explain that, try to correlate your beliefs with the fact that damming rivers has a whole lot more to do with regulating floods and managing water supplies than it has to do with power generation.

Reservoir sites usually contain lots of vegetation, and once underwater, the plants naturally decompose and release methane (a greenhouse gas). That's why it's considered "dirty." It's considered destructive because of the effect on migratory patterns, currents, and the overall eco-system surrounding the dam. There have also been reports of increased temperature levels around hydroelectric dams which can have a very harmful effect on surrounding wildlife.

Actually, it can be easy to predict technological progress. The most popular technological prediction is Moore's Law. What's more interesting is whether we would be following Moore's Law if we didn't believe we could. If we had politicians saying we couldn't do it, and trying would destroy our economy, perhaps we'd be stuck with 20 MHz 32-bit processors.

I'll just put this up there with the perpetual motion machine, because there is always something that breaks any time it comes to energy, nothing is fully renewable. Entropy rules all in the end. I'll believe it when I see it.

Hint: The energy's coming from a very large fusion reactor that will last billions of years. You might be able to spot it if you look out a window during daylight hours.

Niiiiiiice. $19 trillions just for the wind turbines (around 5M each), $100 trillions for the rooftop PV systems (around 60K each), but there is no economic issue. Right.

85 million bbl/day oil consumption (2007)

At $100 per bbl that's $8.5 billion per day or, by 2050 $120 trillion, almost exactly the same cost as you've given above.

Oil is less than $100/bbl now but is almost certainly going to be a lot more than $100/bbl by 2050 (unless, of course, we've switched most of our power generation to alternatives so that there's no longer the same demand)

Right now, migrating off oil is looking approximately economically neutral. There's a cashflow issue - if we do it over the next 40 years we're going to need about $3 trillion tied up in building new infrastructure (assuming it takes about 1 year from starting building to bringing something on line - dams are obviously slower, wind farms seem to be quicker). But the longer we leave it the more urgent it's going to become (eventually there will be a time when we have to be off oil) and the more cash we'll have to tie up in order to build the infrastructure more quickly.

You forget that Canada and Venezuella each have tar sands that are equivalent to the words oil reserves.A nuclear plant can create cheap steam. If a barel of oil hits $200 then it will be economical to make them oil without nuclear.We have oil for a century and then some...

The GDP of the United States is around 14.5 trillion dollars. Taking an average historical growth rate of 3.2% per year, the cumulative GDP of the US from 2011 to 2050 is 1144 trillion dollars.

Therefore, your supposedly preposterous cost represents around 10% of GDP over the period.

In any case, your numbers are an exaggeration even in 2011, and you'd have to be horribly pessimistic to assume the costs of wind turbines and solar energy aren't going to drop over that period. For one thing, the current commo

Double whatever I'm paying now? I'll take it over tripling or quadrupling whatever I'm paying now as oil gets more scarce. At some point, it will be economical to switch to alternative energy. The sooner we start working on scaling it up, the earlier that will be, and the less we'll have to pay for energy. If we don't work on the technological challenges with scaling it up until it's already economical to do so, it will take decades to make the switch and we'll be stuck paying through the nose or even fight

As it becomes economical to switch to alternative energy, people will do so. There are even people who will start to switch before it is economocal. Those people fall into three groups. The first, and smallest, group do it because they can afford to and they want to supply the funds that will speed the development process. The second group do it because their calculations indicate that by the time they have switched to the alternatives, they will be more economical (so far this group is composed of people w

You are assuming that all this infrastructure will last for ever. A wind turbine, for example, has a typical design life of twenty years so by 2050 you'd have to spend the cost twice. And you'd still be back where you started.

.... spending what you're spending now, but on clean and renewable energy instead of oil, and keeping the price of energy stable instead of erratic.

I am a solar installer. A typical 3 kW rooftop installation costs about $20k, nowhere near the 60k you came up with.
Large utility-scale installations make money in the long run, selling power at market rates. This has been true for a couple years now (primarily because of new markets for renewable energy credits in many states). The challenge, as another commenter pointed out, is cash flow and financing.

Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.

Not economic, eh? I suppose you can make any economic argument up and buttress it with facts and graphs and sell it to somebody, but if fails the sanity test. Even China who has the closest thing to a command economy on the planet is hell bent on running up coal and nuclear for the short term. We've barely started to bring 300 MW concentrated solar plants on line, much less create 50,000 of them, hydro is pretty much tapped out in most places and is a risky bet when you factor in climate change (hard to move the stupid things if rainfall predictions are wrong). Tidal and mwave are beta technologies at best and damned expensive ones at that. In the event that the authors of the study have missed it, we're in the midst of a generation changing recession with most of the first world countries who would putatively bankroll this non economic problem having major problems making next month's payroll.

And even if the supposition is correct - even if it's 'only social and political' - how the hell do you plan on solving the most intractable issues that the human race has managed to come up with - that of getting along with each other? Politics is the art of the possible, not pixie dust and ponies (that's Steve Job's department).

Yes, China is investing heavily in wind power, but it is investing just as heavily (if not more so) in expanding its coal power infrastructure as well. China is not investing in wind power as a replacement for coal power, but as a supplement to it.

The recession ended quite some time ago, in case you missed it. It hasn't changed a generation any more than the past few recessions did.

There has been a brief spurt of economic growth in the current depression. None of the fundamentals have changed, and now inflation is really starting to bite after the government's ill-considered money printing binge. Officially unemployment remains at around 10%, but the real number is north of 17%.

This is written by people who understand the difference between reliable base-load sources and less-predictable renewables like wind and solar. Their plan recognizes the need for energy storage to balance out the erratic sources - that's the "270 new 1300MW hydroelectric power plants", which you need for pumped storage. There's a social and political barrier for you - we have enough trouble in the US running new power lines, and this plan requires the construction of hundreds of new dams!?

There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources

I didn't read any further than this. If there aren't any economic barriers, then why does it need any sort of public backing or support. If wind and solar actually were an economic alternative to things like coal, then power companies would be switching without any other sort of incentive, simply to save money.

Now, one could certainly make the argument (though he doesn't) that fossil fuels produce negative externalities to society, and correcting for that clean energy is actually more economic in the long

I think "no economic barriers" is different from "more profitable". There were no economic barriers to going to the moon, but it was not profitable. Because there was no profit in it, we wouldn't expect companies to do it without public backing.

We have quit a lot invested the current way of doing things so some prodding is justifies. But, if you look at new generation, renewables do pretty well. Wind has been playing tag with natural gas for several year and solar put in 16 GW of capacity in 2010 while nukes did less than 3. Both wind and solar will be getting cheaper still so eventual replacement is inevitable as the old stuff breaks. But inertia is expensive. The cost of using coal is much higher than what turns up on your electricity bill,

There are three major issues, two are more technical and one is political:The technical issues: transportation of goods ( by ship, airplane or trucks) and intensive farming. Both rely practically to 100% on oil-based technology and there is no strategy and no technology in sight how to change this, or change it quickly enough.

The other, perhaps more important issue is political: the only way to have the solutions available when we need them is to start pumping money into them now, or even better, yesterday.

Yeah whenever a scientist says X or Y are possible within 30-40 years, then most of the time it takes much much longer, for example Artificial Intelligence. But despite of that we could probably say 100% renewable energy is definately 100% possible in 4500, but the question is: since how long. These are always PR bullshit stories to raise investment. Because how do they know it's then on the marktet, or do the same scientists there also know how the market works? Very clever, because even the economists don

There are technological barriers to things like AI and fusion. We simply don't know how to do them. On the other hand, we know exactly how to build solar energy plants and wind farms. There is no technological barrier to alternative energy, as the article points out.

It pisses me off to see government and/or private organizations saying that we can do this in 40 years. What a fucking cop out, its like saying, "Our children will fix this as soon as we pass control on to them and then we can live out our remaining years with the benifits." I for one think that no government office should be allowed to project more than 10 years, if it can't be done in ten years then you can't brag about it.

Well, nuclear is one, and fusion is another...even though we are being postponed on these 2 for reasons unknown by the gov., maybe they do not want little nuclear cells the size of a hand running your car engine, so that if you bought 20 cars, you would have enough for a small nuc bomb....and same for fusion, once the fusion has become available enough for reg. joe's to use and have, it wont be long before hackers would break it down to know how it works and tweak it, and therefor become self sustaining, as

That energy is not exactly "renewable" in the sense that it can be used again. However, we can make much more use of the energy input that the earth gets from the sun (directly, as in solar panels or heat engines, or indirectly, as in wind and tide energy). That energy is eventually converted to heat and radiated into space, just as the energy was originally radiated in from space. Not renewable in the exact sense, but very clean and sustainable.

Renewable energy != perpetual energySolar power, wind power, hydro power, burning plant matter are all viable renewable energy sources today.Incidentally all have been in use for the last... oohh 3000 years

"Renewable" doesn't mean "perpetual", it means "lasts as long as the sun". The sun won't last forever, but probably well over a billion years, while oil will likely be depleted in under 100 years (and maybe far sooner than that).

And, don't forget, the sun doesn't care whether we use the energy before radiating it back into space (as heat). The sun will die in a billion years or so, whether we use the energy or radiate it back as soon as it arrived.

Why on earth would anyone want to remove yet another limit to human growth?

Where do you see a correlation between access to energy and population growth?

The countries with greater population countries are Liberia, Burundi, Afghanistan, Western Sahara, East Timor, Niger, Eritrea, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Palestinian territories. Clearly they have too much access to energy.

What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.

The Chinese population is continuing to rise because the one child policy has been in place for only several decades, and improvements in health have increased the average lifespan. The Chinese population will go down when people born before the one child policy die of old age, in a few decades.

>>We simply need to decrease the surplus population of ravenously resource-hungry bourgeoisie

Yes, comrade! We must destroy the rapacious bourgeoisie that are breeding like rats and... oh, wait, what? All affluent countries are having problems with population *decreases* instead of exponential growth? Damn, I guess all you people stuck in the 1800s with Malthus are wrong, huh?

The only people still undergoing large population expansions are the uneducated poor - and if you make the poor educated and wealthy, they magically stop having as many kids (well, it's maybe birth control instead of magic, but you get my point, comrade).

>>What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.

Lord, you're just a walking stereotype of the tyrannical communist, aren't you? Weren't you supposed to have been purged back in the 40s alongside all your other fellow true believer Stalinists?

Not for now. Will there be in less than 70 years, when the world's population has doubled from the current 7 billion?

And if you feel so strongly that the population needs to be reduced, that humanity should just let itself fade away, then why don't you lead by example and off yourself?

Stupid dichotomy. I didn't defend that we should disappear. I'm simply saying we shouldn't have many children to reduce the current growth rate to reasonable levels.If you can't understand the difference, I don't think you'll be of much help getting us out of this rock.

Yep, it is about time we think of protecting those Martians from the destructive colonial powers on Earth. While we're at it, we should declare all life in the solar system, e.g., Jovian, Saturnian, Uranian, Neptumian, Plutonian, etc. sacred and not to be even interacted with. With a bit more legislation, we can protect all life in the Milky Way from the destructive influences of humans. No need to stop there, let's do it as a favor to all life in the Universe. Hell, let's do it for the entire Multiverse. And let's not let time get in the way, let's protect all life past and future from humans.

Everyone will be issued hari-kari knives and asked to do the dirty deed on Dec. 21, 2012. Before we do, we'll paint the Earth to look like a giant bullseye from space. That way, the asteroid Apophis can make doubly sure humans never, ever happen again. Repent! Save humanity! Die today!

Do these people understand money, time and resources are not cheap and infinite?

If (or rather: once) the energy situation gets bad enough money will stop being a consideration and resources will indeed be "infinite" in the sense that they will simply be utilised no matter what, and by force if necessary. So they err not in their assumptions per se but in their timing. It will be a long way to go before the powers that be stop evaluating their options in units of currency. But it will happen. It has to, really.

>>By 2050 disease and war will have reduced the global population to a fraction of what it is today

I am fascinated with your ability to predict the future and would like to subscribe to your RSS feed.

If anything, though, diseases and war have been trending down in the last 60 years. The only real threats these days is some sort of unknown superbug, or a rogue state engineering a superAIDS virus (or just getting nuclear weapons and dropping it on us).